Thursday, January 10, 2008

Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) are, amongst other things, a domain registry for this new fangled interweb. When you want to buy a domain name, you do a "whois" lookup to see if it's available, then you buy it if it's available and you really want it.

The trouble is, NSI are registering domains that are looked up using their whois server... So, if you check to see if a domain is available using their server, but want to register the domain with another company, you can't because NSI have helpfully registered the domain, forcing you to buy it from them... This is apparently known as "front-running".

The helpful people at slashdot have a number of potential solutions to this problem (other than not using NSI in the first place)including looking up (and hence making NSI register) a bunch of random domain names using a perl script. An alternative is to do a whois on a number of interesting domain names which include registered trademarks as part of the name - and then hope that a Cease and Desist letter is sent to NSI for trademark infringements...

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Apparently the west end of Princes St to Shandwick Place and the east end at St Andrew Square are to be closed for 16 weeks while workers move pipes and cables in preparation for the trams...

Hang on, so you mean we've got to go through more roadworks on the same stretch of road in the future? Oh yes, when they start laying the tracks, sometime in the future... In the meantime, they're just going to fuck about a bit, and piss off all the folk who are trying to commute in Edinburgh - Shandwick Place is a bottleneck for bus services at the best of times...

"The work will be completed before August so as not to impact on the Edinburgh Festival."

Of course what he really meant to say was:

"The festival is the be all and end all of life in Edinburgh, and we wouldn't want to give the tourists a bad impression, so in the meantime, we're going to fuck up the roads because we think Edinburgh's residents are cunts and don't care how this unwanted trams project effects the city. "

Saturday, January 05, 2008

A friend has just sent me an email with a link to this site, specifically, this cartoon:

Webinar is not a word. Stop using it you illiterate fucks! That non-word first came to my attention on the notice board at work several months ago. Yes, it's me that corrects the notices... Bullshit marketing terms made up to make things sound hip and interesting are not welcome on this blog, or anywhere near me!